In high school, my history teacher had the nerve to force us teenagers—without second thought—to actually pay attention to current events. We actually had to, as I recall, find multiple current events over the course of a week, and rehash the main points of each event. To say that this practice then seemed noble on her part, as if she wanted us to keep abreast on global happenings, would have been spurious; most students unabashedly waited until the last day, went online, or waited for CNN or MSNBC or some other acronym-happy network to gather news from the past week, in the end throwing together a simple, but passing-grade analysis.
At least, that’s what I remember doing. It’s funny now, though, because, were I given that task today, I’d have to approach it completely differently. I couldn’t have simply turned on CNN this morning, written something up, and successfully fooled my teacher into thinking I actually did a week’s worth of watching, staying up-to-date and reading all the news I was fit to find—though I’m not sure I fooled her then either, but that’s not my beef. No, my beef lies with the qualitative differences between the different news formats today.
Today, I turned on the aptly-titled “boob tube” and heard not only more of the MTV “shock and awe” halftime show, but also of the Grammies recognizing Beyonce as the best damn artist this year—dead or alive. My question is…where’s the news?
On CSPAN2 at the same time—warning: I’m a nerd—was a media conference between some ABC late-night, local-area newscaster, an ABC journalist, and a group of teenagers. One of the kids asked a question about the changing face of network news, as anchors get younger and only exciting things like death, destruction, and nudity are newsworthy. This question prompted a response from the newscaster akin to “well, we like news, but we’re really about the ratings at heart.”
I don’t think that’s really news to anyone—pun 100 percent intended—and that former history teacher of mine mustn’t be pleased by cable news today, because she doesn’t accept entertainment as a substitution for news. If CNN wants to reach audiences and attain those higher ratings, they need honorary guest anchors each week in the form of the current entertainment gods and goddesses. That way they can compromise their image without compromising their content, too. Though I’m sure cable news would somehow lose its sense of seriousness if it had any to begin with.
